Did I confess that I got a 360 over the weekend? Yeah, Target had a pretty good deal on them (you got a $50 gift card with your purchase) so I picked up the 20GB version and a copy of Gears of War. Earlier I'd gotten the HD-DVD drive.
It's been a couple of days now and I haven't done much with it (Gears is still shrink-wrapped, for instance) but I have hooked it all up and have some first impressions...
* That power supply is easily the largest damn external power supply I've ever seen for any piece of electronic equipment I have ever owned. What the hell is up with that?
* I'm too used to Apple's elegant packaging. The box-opening experience was underwhelming.
* If you get a Xbox 360, have a USB keyboard handy. It's a lot easier to do all the registration for Xbox Live with a keyboard than with your wireless controller.
* People complain about how loud it is... I can't hear it over my MythTV backend, which is noticeable but not particularly loud. I'll admit it did make me reconsider how loud my backend is. I might have to try to quiet it down some.
* Like I said, I haven't tried Gears yet. All I've tried is UNO and Geometry Wars, both of which are very pretty and surely push the awesome firepower of my next-gen gaming platform to its limits. :)
As for DVD and HD-DVD playback...
* I'm really disappointed in DVD playback. First of all, it's not upsampling... it switches down to 480p since I'm connected via component. Even that wouldn't be so bad, but it's the black level that's the real problem. It's washed out and icky looking. The blacks are fine, however, in game play. So if I adjusted for DVD playback, blacks would get crushed everywhere else. Ugh. Guess the "real" DVD player is going back into the mix.
* I finally got to watch a bit of my bundled HD-DVD version of King Kong. It looked darn good... but I'm not sure it's all that much better than a DVD. People have mentioned this as a problem with both the HD disc formats... people may not notice the difference that much. I'll admit that it could be a limitation of my very old HDTV, so a new TV could fix that. Nevertheless, the picture was good, and I didn't have the black level problems I saw with regular DVD. The only other issue I had was that the soundtrack seemed to lack "oomph." The dynamic range that I'm used to on most discs didn't seem to be there.
All told, I'm pretty pleased. Looking forward to trying out movie downloads later this month!
No comments:
Post a Comment